The Island Dwellers

by Jen Silverman

  I’d taken a shower and I was standing naked in the bathroom, drying off. He was in the doorway watching me, drinking me in with that barely concealed hunger that would have been disconcerting if I didn’t almost envy the ability to feel it. And then he asked, like he really wanted to know.

  I remember that I didn’t know what to tell him. I sat there holding his hair dryer, listening to the whir, and finally I turned it off and said, honestly, “I don’t think so.”

  “Think about it,” he’d said. Insistent. “What about when you were a kid?”

  I thought about it. England, smoky prepubescence, fourteen-year-olds with toffee-and-tea accents trading cigarettes in the stairwell of Harrow and calling them fags, a bit of Brit slang which even then amused me to no end. Later, in Seoul, an older kid with a motorcycle who’d give me lifts back from school. When he dropped me off was the best part of every interminable day, mouths mashed together, fingers groping under jackets. The guy before Anthony—an earnest, quiet German, he gave a great blow job and didn’t need to talk afterward.

  I unplugged Anthony’s hair dryer and put it on the counter.

  “Nope,” I said.

  Anthony was frowning, like he didn’t quite understand. He picked up the hair dryer and started polishing off the condensation with the edge of his T-shirt.

  “What about a crush?” he said. “Those can feel like love. Being infatuated with someone. Noticing these incredibly minute details. Appreciating that they make you feel something new, something refreshing—”

  I grinned. “Is this where you tell me that you’re just a teenage girl under all that hair?”

  “You really are twenty-one,” Anthony said, disappointed. “But even so, most kids your age—”

  “Seventeen,” I corrected.

  Anthony’s eyes widened. “What?”

  “Seventeen,” I said, slower, enunciating. “I’m seventeen. I’ve been lying to you.”

  A longer silence. Anthony laid the hair dryer down on the wet counter, like he was afraid he’d break it. I looked at him and thought that he was more attractive like this, with this muddy sort of roiling on his face and not that slow kind of sadness that made me want to hurt him. This new look, it made me hard.

  “Get out,” Anthony said at last. “Grab your shit and get out of my apartment.”

  But of course he asked me back again, later.

  * * *

  —

  AS WE WALKED THROUGH THE narrow paths between the rice paddies, Katsuhiro gave us a crash course on how to find mamushi, and Nori translated. They could be found in the water, between the stones of stone walls, and for some reason they had a predilection for cherry trees. “They jump,” Nori added, “sideways, it’s incredible.” Katsuhiro ground to a stop, pointed at a low wall separating two rice paddies from each other and spoke to Nori in fast Japanese. When he finished he turned around and walked back toward the truck.

  “Where’s he going?” I asked.

  Nori shrugged. “He was drinking late last night, now he’s going to take a nap.”

  “But what about the snakes?”

  Katsuhiro unloaded a forked stick and a glass jar from the cab of the truck. He gave us a Nikon-moment thumbs-up, then crawled into the cab, shutting the door after him. I stared at Nori. He shrugged again.

  “He told us where they are and how to catch them, what’s your problem?”

  “We’ve never caught any before, that’s my problem!”

  “It can’t be that hard,” Nori said dismissively. “Who’s smarter, you or a snake?” Then he studied me, and grinned. “On second thought…”

  Despite Nori’s optimism, the first mamushi took us by surprise, emerging from a crack in the stone wall suddenly and with intention. The two of us leapt backward. “It’s okay,” Nori said, like he hadn’t jumped too. But by then the snake was gone, into the water of the rice paddy.

  “You know in the fall, the mom snakes shed their teeth,” Nori said, watching the water resettle.

  “Fangs, not teeth,” I said, imagining a pit viper with braces and an underbite.

  Nori shrugged. “They bite anything in sight—you know those bamboo poles in the rice paddies? When mamushi pull back, they leave the teeth in the bamboo. You can collect them. Some people grind up the teeth and—”

  “Wait,” I said, “wait wait. Anything in sight?”

  Nori sighed. “Take the glass jar,” he said. “I can see we’re not going anywhere if you’re the one holding the stick.”

  If it had been anyone else but Nori, I would have said something cutting about how nobody had ever complained about me holding his stick. But I didn’t know what Nori knew about me, and I didn’t want to risk it. Being friends with Nori was just about the only thing that made me want to get up in the morning, and I wasn’t about to throw it away.

  “What’s your plan?” I asked, like I didn’t care. Nori wasn’t fooled.

  “Snake!” he yelled, suddenly. I jumped backward again, saw him laughing, and flipped him off, but Nori was already halfway to the stone wall. I guess the kid had it in his head that he was going to eat one of these bastards and live forever; personally, I didn’t know why anyone would want to.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN WE TOLD THE STORY later, to two of our classmates back in Tokyo, Nori was kind enough to pretend like I’d had an active hand in the snake-catching. We were skipping after-school club activities, grabbing a meal at the ramen stand on the corner. I don’t think any of us had plans to go home for dinner that night. Nori was going to the arcade with a girl from the grade below us. Paulo Yasuhara, the Brazilian-Japanese kid of some executive, was headed to the Roppongi clubs with Kaneda, who was as sleazy as Yasuhara but not as sexy. As for me, I was going to Anthony’s, but none of the others had to know that.

  “—dived after it,” Nori was saying, excitedly. “And we’ve got it trapped with its head in the forked stick, its body is lashing, it’s going crazy, it takes this lunge forward and its fangs like brush Ancash’s hand, we’re screaming at each other—and the snake gets freaked out by all the screaming and it lunges forward into the jar.”

  “No way,” Kaneda said, impressed.

  Yasuhara lit a cigarette. “Nori says you eat one mouthful and your boner’s gonna be raging for weeks,” he said, looking at me directly as he took a drag. “You gonna eat a mouthful, Ancash?”

  His gaze was always like that—hooded and calculating. The few run-ins we had always felt like the preview to some kind of investigation—one that might involve torture. It made something twist in my stomach, dark and good.

  “Yeah,” I deadpanned. “You want me to come find you when I do?”

  The guys all laughed. The corners of Yasuhara’s mouth moved in a murky smile.

  “I’ll get in line,” he said, and the guys laughed again. Nori laughed, but his eyes flickered between Yasuhara and me like he was trying to figure out what was happening. The only way to kill the confused curiosity in Nori’s eyes was to take this all the way over the top.

  “You better bring a snack,” I drawled, “it’s one hell of a line,” and then I leaned over across the table and grabbed Yasuhara’s face, as if I was going to kiss him. From this close, the pale gray of his eyes was strangely mesmerizing. I heard the guys yelling behind me, and when I pushed him away in mock-disgust, I saw that Nori was laughing. My mouth hadn’t touched his but I’d felt his breath on my lips, I’d heard the catch in it, and the adrenaline of victory coursed through my veins. I’d heard it, that catch. Not so cool now, are you?

  The guys were talking again around us, a warm tide of normal conversation. Yasuhara looked at me over his cigarette, one quick flash. The smooth line of his throat. He knew that I knew that he knew that I knew, all the way back to when the first caveman was fighting with the second caveman over a joint of dinosaur meat,
and somebody swung a punch and then another, and caveman-muscle met caveman-muscle with sickening impact, heat and sweat—and then all of a sudden the punching turned to pulling, closer, closer, that sweet angry friction, fighting turned to fucking and the dinosaur was forgotten.

  Yasuhara’s mouth twisted in that sudden brief smile that came and went like heat lightning and I felt my own mouth move in an answering smile.

  * * *

  —

  THE PARTY BROKE UP AFTER THAT. Yasuhara and Kaneda moved off to kill some time in a manga café before dark, and I walked Nori back toward the arcade where he was meeting the girl. Nori said that she was Swedish, had spent the last three years in Tokyo but still couldn’t handle Japanese. “But she has pillow-tits,” he added. When I burst out laughing, he continued, “I dunno where white guys get the yellow fever from. Japanese girls are skinny and crazy.”

  I loved how Nori talked shit with his soft mouth and those big shining eyes. “What do you mean crazy?”

  “They’ll cut your heart out and eat it on rice,” Nori said. We skirted a row of bicycles, cutting down an alley. It was evening, and you could smell food cooking behind the lighted rectangles of every window. “They repress and repress and then they just lose it. You know Kaneda’s girlfriend went for him with a knife once? Japanese are crazy, I’m not even kidding, they do jealousy like nobody else.”

  I grabbed his wrist, yanking him out of the way of an oncoming motorcycle. “Hey,” I said, “watch where you’re walking. Anyway, aren’t you Japanese?”

  “Who the fuck knows,” Nori said. Then, “Do you like Japanese girls?”

  Caught off guard, I hesitated. I hadn’t dropped Nori’s wrist when I’d pulled him away from the motorcycle, and now we stood at the edge of the street, practically holding hands, his skin hot to the touch. He didn’t seem to notice. I let go of him quickly.

  “Sure,” I said, “I guess.”

  “Do you like American girls better?”

  I rubbed my hand on my jeans. “They’re okay.” I flickered a glance at him but his face was open and guileless.

  Nori grinned. “Yasuhara says French girls don’t shave.” He resumed walking. “You know Nicole, from the kendo club? He did it with her.” We began to pass the entrance to the JR, and now Nori was hesitating. “I should go home and check on the snake,” he said.

  “Nori, why the fuck do you need to check on the snake? It’s not like you need to feed it.”

  “I know,” Nori said, “but I haven’t seen it all day, I don’t know. Come back and check with me.”

  “No way,” I said. “I’m not going in your room till that thing’s dead.”

  But I followed him down into the subway anyway, Noriyuki carving a path through rush-hour crowds and me following, my eyes fixed on the curve of his shoulders under the dark blue of his school jacket.

  * * *

  —

  EVEN AS ANTHONY OPENED THE door, he was saying, “Where have you been, it’s been days—” He stopped, when he saw me still wearing my uniform jacket. I knew he would. He liked me in stiff button-down white shirts, ironed blazer-pants. Liked me looking like an innocent rich kid who wasn’t quite ready to get shoved up against a wall. Everybody wants to feel like they can corrupt someone.

  “You’re up late, Anthony,” I said smoothly. I knew he’d stand aside, and he did.

  “Where were you?” he demanded.

  “Tonight? All over.”

  “And the past few days? Where have you been for those?”

  I shrugged. “Hiroshima.”

  He hadn’t expected that one. “During a school week?” Genuinely curious now: “What’s in Hiroshima?”

  Nights like this, it could go either way. We could sit down and talk. He could be kind, he wanted to know things about me, little things. What kind of music I listened to. What I read. Jokes that made me laugh. He could kiss my cheekbones, the edge of my eyes, he could say gentle things. I didn’t need that.

  “This guy,” I said, deliberately. “In Hiroshima City.”

  And there it was. Slow flush of scarlet. “Oh yeah?”

  And so it went the other way.

  He fell asleep after we were done. I lay next to him for a few minutes, listening to my ragged breathing, feeling the sticky throbbing in my face. At last I sat up, wincing at the twinge in my shoulder, and walked into the bathroom. There was a mirror against the back of the door. I closed it partway and stood there for a few minutes, staring without seeing myself.

  I was remembering a few hours earlier, Noriyuki and that damn viper. It didn’t even look like it was hungry yet, coiled in its glass jar, barely moving.

  “There are only three dangerous animals in all of Japan,” Nori had told me, turning the glass jar so he could see the snake from all angles. “Wild boars, mamushi, and bears.”

  “We woulda been better off catching a wild boar,” I said, tapping the jar lid with my fingernails. “We caught an old lady snake. You eat this bitch, your dick goes limper than udon.”

  Nori laughed. “That’s what you think,” he said. “Watch this.”

  He reached into his pocket, came up with a lighter, and flicked it on. I heard the dull thud of the snake’s head connecting with the glass before I even saw it move. It didn’t notice the glass was in the way, it just reared back, adjusted its angle, and tried again. Nori held the lighter above the jar this time. The mamushi reared straight up, bashing its head on the jar lid, and I could see that its two little needle-fangs had unfolded.

  “Jesus!” I said. My heart was slamming into my ribs. “What the fuck!”

  “They hunt by heat sensors,” Nori explained. “They can feel the temperature change from a few feet away. When our hands were near the air holes he started tracking us, that’s why his tongue was flickering more, he was waiting for us to get closer. The lighter is so strong, though, that he thought we were right there. Pretty awesome, yeah?”

  Nori flicked the lighter on-off again, this time to the left of the jar, and the snake tried to rear around. Another failed strike. And all of a sudden I just wanted Nori to stop. I grabbed Nori’s hand.

  “Okay,” I said, “I get it, enough.”

  He looked at me strangely. “It doesn’t hurt the snake,” he said. “It thinks it’s hunting us.”

  * * *

  —

  ANTHONY’S VOICE, FROM THE DOORWAY, brought me back.

  “What’re you doing? Come back to bed.”

  I looked at him and he flinched and dropped his eyes. I looked in the mirror for real this time. It hadn’t felt that different from normal when we were in the middle of it, but I looked like I’d been in a war zone. My lower lip was swollen, blood spattered liberally over my mouth and chin, a bruise darkening along my cheekbone. I turned toward Anthony, genuinely impressed. He was staring at the floor. I was afraid, suddenly, that he was going to cry.

  “Go back to bed,” I said, fast and cold.

  “What’re you going to say in school tomorrow?”

  “I’m not gonna say anything.”

  “They’ll ask you about it. They’ll call you in.”

  I shrugged. “So I got jumped. It’s not your problem, Anthony, nothing that happens outside of this room is your problem.”

  Anthony was silent for a long time. Outside the apartment, Tokyo whirred on like a neon machine set on “forever.” You could hear the beat of club music even from here. I turned on the faucet and started washing blood off my face. We hadn’t touched my face except for the first time. Torso yeah, arms, then one day shoulders and back became fair game, but not the face. Well, we’d have gotten there eventually. It’s not like it made any difference. The bloody water swirling around the sink basin was dyeing the porcelain a vaguely pinkish hue. I didn’t think the color would stick, though, so I didn’t say anything.

  Into the s
ilence Anthony said, very softly, “It could be different. With us. It could be so different, Ancash.”

  I lifted my head from the sink and stared at him.

  He looked at me. Dripping pink water on the bathroom tiles. Something passed between us, old and weary.

  “No,” I said. “It couldn’t though.”

  * * *

  —

  I GOT NORI’S TEXT MESSAGE on my way to the nurse’s office, but I figured in the rush of lunch hour, she wouldn’t notice if I didn’t show up. The door to the men’s bathroom was closed when I got there. I eased it open, and was greeted by the sight of Kaneda, Nori, and Yasuhara crouched in a semicircle. “Ancash,” Nori drawled, “better late than never.” And then the grin fell off his face. “Fuck, what happened to you?”

  Yasuhara had been lighting a cigarette but at the tone in Nori’s voice, he straightened and looked over at me. His eyebrows went up.

  “Let me guess,” Yasuhara drawled. “Whatever it was, you lost.”

  “No big deal,” I said. “I got jumped in Roppongi.”

  Nori was frowning. “Roppongi?” he echoed, and then I remembered stopping by Anthony’s place before Hiroshima.

  “Yeah,” I shrugged. “What’s up with the snake?”

  Nori kept his eyes on me, but answered the question anyway. “I was showing the guys the heat-sensor thing.”

  Kaneda moved his hand near the jar, tentatively, but the snake ignored him.

  “You have to keep it there longer,” Yasuhara told him scornfully. “It’s gotta feel your heat.” He flicked his lighter on and held it steady over the lid. The snake lashed out as it had before, fell back, regrouped, lashed out again. Kaneda drew back this time; Nori was still crouched there looking searchingly at me. I didn’t want him looking at me like that, like he was trying to guess at things he shouldn’t know about. The rhythmic bashing of the snake’s head against glass was doing something sick to my stomach. I grabbed the lighter away from Yasuhara, burning my hand.